(suspenseful orchestral music)
- [Crowd] Six, five, four,
three, two, one.
- [Man] New Horizons and Pluto, 2015, woo!
- With the New Horizons going to the Pluto system,
it really is a system.
It's a little mini solar system in its own right.
We have not only Pluto,
but we also have a giant moon next to it, Charon.
- When we first saw Pluto,
Clyde Tombaugh first saw it
and brought it to the world's attention,
it was a mere dot.
Liquid particles, they can move around.
Like when you jump in the pool,
you're able to swim around.
It stayed a mere dot for a long time.
In the 1970s,
my stepfather, Jim Christy,
kept looking at that dot.
- As he was looking at them,
he noticed that there was a bump
on one of the sides of Pluto.
He noticed that this bump seemed to move.
- He was very surprised.
And then after the surprise,
he got a little worried.
Was he seeing things
or was he actually seeing what he thought he saw?
By looking at that and factoring that in,
he deduced that something must be moving around Pluto.
And therefore, he was able to figure out
that there was a satellite.
- Well I was at work when he called.
And he said I think I'm gonna be famous.
I think I've discovered a moon.
- And then comes the big waiting game,
having to get more evidence for that.
- Jim did the measuring
and Bob did the statistics.
And they paralleled in their answers.
He told me that he would try to name the moon after me
if he could.
And he just had made up the name Charon.
Char is what my family call me.
And he put the O-N onto the end of it.
- When he came up with that idea,
he was a bit worried
that maybe he bit off more than he could chew
because he was worried about
the International Astronomical Union
approving something like that.
- He got up, he was thinking oh my gosh.
I hoped I can name it after her, but I'm not sure.
So anyway he went to find the dictionary.
- And so he got the dictionary out and he looked it up.
And there it was in the dictionary.
And it fit because it was within Greek mythology.
And then it was accepted
by the International Astronomical Union
as Charon, the boatman that ferried the dead souls
across the river Styx.
I just feel so proud.
And like I say,
a lot of husbands promise their wives the moon,
but he delivered.
- And she has a big smile on her face
when she says that.
- [Man] Three, two, one.
We have ignition and liftoff
of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft
on a decade long voyage to visit the planet Pluto
and then beyond.
(audience cheering and clapping)
- The whole world saw it for the first time.
And all we had seen before
was just a little fuzzy blur like.
And to be able to see it it was just incredible.
- There's a giant chasm
encircling the equator of Charon
that we think is a remnant of
a water ice ocean
that was just underneath its surface
in the early days,
more than four billion years ago.
- It's kind of amazing when you think about it.
You know, all that happened over the last 40 years.
(dramatic orchestral music)